Observation final draft

In view of the lab geeks

I work in the Molecular Sequencing lab at ARUP. There are four parts in this lab: the analysis room, the clean room, master mix room, and the dirty room.

As I sit inside the analysis room, where all the test results are verified out to the clients and patients, I take in my surroundings. It is very quiet in the analysis room; the only sound is the clicking of the technologists on their keyboards, hunched over in their squeaking worn down chairs. It smells of paper in this room. The hot smell of warm paper freshly spat out of the printer. It makes my nose dry and burn.

The clean room is where I spend most of my time while at work. I work to keep this room particularly clean because it is where I bring the serum and plasma specimens into the lab as well as where the DNA inside is extracted. We don’t want cross-contamination of the samples and none of us was Hepatitis C, Hepatitis B, or HIV either.

The dirty room is named so because the invisible reagent called amplicon is everywhere. We use it to ‘amplify’ the number of DNA strands so it makes sequencing it on the 3730, a multi-million dollar instrument, more accurate. However if any of it gets into the other rooms, it could cause major potential contamination.

The View café is the cafeteria at ARUP Laboratories. My subjects will be my fellow employees at 7:00 AM at breakfast time. A motley bunch of folk occupy The View at this hour. It is the end of the graveyard shift and the beginning of the day shift (I work at 5:00 AM) and so there is a great mix of different persons.

As I waited in line to get my breakfast, I watched a couple in the line behind me talking. Neither the man nor the woman was facing each other; they were both facing forward, slightly turned inward, hands in pockets and folded, with their heads turned. There was a good 3 feet between them. Vague friends, I assumed. Annoyed that they had made eye contact and much make small talk to appease social norms.

ARUP is a very diverse company. It is one of the reasons I really enjoy working here. In my lab alone, there is a man from Bosnia, one from Bolivia, and a woman from China. The View is no different. There are many ethnicities sitting together. I like to watch the interaction and the communication. Especially the errors and how people go about correcting themselves according to their audience.

There is not much touching here as it is a professional work environment. The only touching I see is between a married couple sitting together with their legs touching.

There is a certain group of the night shift that are my particular favorite to watch (we call them the night goobers). They sit and play fantasy card games while they eat their breakfast; exclaiming loudly when an opposing player has made an attack.

“Ha, newbie! My creature is a wind element and your spell is air-based. So it does no damage!”

The loud noise shocks all of us and makes us twitch. Most have only recently gotten to work and are still half asleep.

There is also the group of people who prefer to eat alone at this early hour (the group I belong to) and sit at the bar chairs facing the large windows that overlook the Salt Lake Valley. It is this view that gives The View its name. You can also see over the vast parking lots from this view. It is highly entertaining to watch the vulture-like cars circle the parking lots numerous times, scavenging for a parking spot. People will spend ten minutes looking for a potential spot other than just park slightly farther away and walk. I don’t know how God does it; watching us all doing what we do, making our lives harder than they should be.

I believe God is probably the greatest observer of them all.

Today I have sat with my back to the windows to observe my peers. It is amusing to watch and listen to the table next to me. It started out with two men talking about video games, music, and the world cup that will be held in Johannesburg, South Africa this summer until a woman, presumably from their lab, came to join them. She laughed as she sat down and asked,

“Is this where the single men sit?” The conversation quickly changed to the current happenings and gossip in their lab. Three more women have joined them and the table is now filled with high-pitched giggling and the now out-numbered men have grown quiet. They have all adjusted their chairs to give each other the appropriate amount of space.

Ironic, that I have found such a fascinating view on the inside.